How do you read a book like a literature professor?

How to Read Novels Like a Professor is a lively and entertaining guide to understanding and dissecting novels, making reading more enriching and satisfying. In the follow up to his wildly popular How to Read Literature Like a Professor, Thomas C. Foster provides students with tried-and-true techniques to use in analyzing some of the most important works in literary history. How to Read Novels Like a Professor shows readers how to consider and a novel’s historical fine points as well as major themes, literary models (the Bible, Shakespeare, Greek mythology, and fairy tales), and narrative devices like irony, plot, and symbol.

Critical Praise

“By bringing his eminent scholarship to bear in doses measured for the common reader or occasional student, Professor Foster has done us all a generous turn. The trained eye, the tuned ear, the intellect possesed of simple cyphers brings the literary arts alive.” — Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking

“A smart, accessible, and thoroughly satisfying examination of what it means to read a work of literature. Guess what? It isn’t all that hard, not when you have a knowledgeable guide to show the way. Dante had his Virgil; for everyone else, there is Thomas Foster.” — Nicholas A. Basbanes, author of A Gentle Madness, Patience & Fortitude, and Among the Gently Mad

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster’s classic guide—a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes and contexts, that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes-of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.

What does it mean when a literary hero is traveling along a dusty road When he hands a drink to his companion When he’s drenched in a sudden rain shower

Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower-and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "How to Read Literature Like a Professor" by Thomas C. Foster. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What does it mean to read and analyze literature like a professor? What are the differences between how a student and teacher reads literature?

When a student reads literature, she tends to focus on the characters, plot, and emotions. When a professor reads literature, she focuses on memory, symbols, and patterns in the story and looks for the deeper truths.

Keep reading to learn how professors go about reading literature.

What It Means to Read Literature Like a Professor

A literature professor is always looking for meaning and significance beyond the text of a novel, poem, or play. If you want to know how to read literature like a professor, here’s an example:

In the play A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, the protagonist, Walter Lee Younger, moves his African American family into an all-white community. A white man named Mr. Linder comes to Walter with an offer: He wants to buy the Younger family out of their claim on the house. Although the offer is insulting, Walter Lee is forced to consider it. This is one of the play’s primary dramas. 

Imagine you’ve just read the play. Would you be surprised to hear your literature professor say that Mr. Lindner is the devil? Would you have come to that conclusion on your own? 

If not, that’s okay. That means that you, the student, and your professor have read the same story, but not in the same way. Your professor has had practice analyzing literature and finding its conventions and codes. She has the skills to remember instances of bargaining with the devil in other stories, and connect that pattern to Mr. Lindner through common plot devices and themes. 

So what is the difference between reading like a student and reading like a professor?

Students:

• Focus mostly on the plot and characters in a story.
• Respond to the story first on an emotional level.

Professors: 

• Focus mostly on memory, symbol, and pattern in the story.
• Accept the emotional response, but look deeper to find the universal truth displayed. 

Memory, Symbol, and Pattern

Memory: When you read with a powerful memory, you actively look for how the text corresponds to other literary works. You mentally flip through the things you’ve read before and look for similarities (or differences) to the structure, theme, or characters of what you’re reading now. 

• Example: Watching Pale Rider starring Clint Eastwood might make you think of the movie Shane from 1953.

Symbol: When you read literature with a symbolic mind, you constantly look for metaphors and analogies. You not only see things for what they actually are, but also what they might represent. 

• Example: The monster in Beowulf is not only an actual monster, but also a representation of the dark side of human nature which can only be overcome by achieving a higher version of ourselves. 

Pattern: When you read to observe patterns, you recognize the similarities between life and books. You look beyond the plot to see how the drama and characters illustrate a truth of human experience. 

• Non-literary example: A good car mechanic can use pattern recognition to diagnose a car. They can see that if these things are happening, it is probably caused by this. Then they know to check that. 

The combination of using memory, identifying symbols, and recognizing patterns allows the reader to analyze literature in a new light. If you ignore memory, symbols, and patterns in literature, you will not be able to appreciate a book for everything that it says between the lines.

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